President Barack Obama’s continued call for “common-sense proposals to make it harder for
criminals to get their hands on a gun” is something that everyone agrees with. Unfortunately, the
president's claims about what his proposals will do are misleading, and they are more likely to do
more harm than good.

Consider background checks. According to Obama and gun-control advocates, “40 percent of all gun
purchases are conducted without a background check.” That is just false. Only if you were to
classify family inheritances and gifts as “purchases” would you get a number anywhere near that
high.

Today, the Brady Act requires that federally licensed dealers check whether potential gun buyers
have not committed a felony or many types of misdemeanors, have not been dishonorably discharged
from the military and not been involuntarily committed for mental illness. Before the Brady Act
went into effect in 1994, half the states imposed such requirements, but federal law only required
people sign a statement that they did not have a criminal record or a history of mental
problems.

Now the 40 percent figure rounds up a claim that 36 percent of “transfers” were done without a
background check, and that number came from a small 251-person survey conducted two decades ago,
from November 1991 to December 1994. That is the only study done, and most of the survey covered
sales before the Brady Act instituted mandatory federal background checks, telling us nothing about
checks since.

More important, the 36 percent figure comes only from including such transactions as
inheritances or gifts from family members. If you look at guns that were sold, 88 percent went
through federally licensed gun dealers.

This survey also found that all gun-show sales went through federally licensed dealers.

We don’t know the precise number today of transfers without background checks, but it is hard to
believe that the percent of sales without them is above single digits. But even if a few purchases
avoid checks, should we expand them? It depends on how the system would be implemented.

The current system is severely flawed, some checks causing dangerous delays for people who
suddenly need a gun for self-defense, such as a woman being stalked by an ex. Beyond the computer
crashes, 7 percent of the checks are not accomplished within two hours, with most of those taking
three days or longer.

Obama and others have asserted recently that background checks have “blocked 1.7 million
prohibited individuals from buying a gun.” But that is wrong. These were only “initial denials,”
not people prevented from buying guns.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms dropped more than 94 percent of those “initial
denials” after just preliminary reviews. And at least 22 percent of the remaining cases still were
incorrectly stopping law-abiding citizens from buying guns, bringing the total false positive rate
to around 95 percent.

For a few people, these delays can make a huge difference in being able to defend themselves.
Indeed, my own research suggests these delays might actually contribute to a slight net increase in
violent crime, particularly rapes.

No amount of background checks on private transfers would have stopped the attacks in
Connecticut, Wisconsin or Colorado. Nor could the system possibly work without government
registering all guns. And even complete gun bans in Washington and Chicago have not stopped
criminals from getting guns.

But it certainly makes no sense to expand the background-check system before it is fixed.
Passing laws may make people feel better, but they can actually prevent people from defending
themselves.

John Lott is a former chief economist at the U.S. Sentencing Commission and the author of At
the Brink. He wrote this for The Philadelphia Inquirer.